gigaom.com Archives - 26 September 2017, Tuesday

Wiper , an ephemeral messaging app that launched in 2014, has a reputation as a Snapchat clone , but it’s actually closer to Line, which uses over-the-top messaging as a platform to sell stickers, games, and other entertainment and services. Taking a kitchen-sink approach to messaging...

a year of testing bitcoin payments with select customers, Stripe is making the cryptocurrency an option for all of its customers – of at least those with a U.S. bank account. Stripe provides the payment processing for sharing economy apps, online retailers and mobile developers, and t...

The Winklevoss twins aren’t done with bitcoin yet. Since 2012, the pair so far has invested millions in the cryptocurrency, launched the WinkDex bitcoin price monitor and are still trying to clear regulatory hurdles for their bitcoin ETF, the Bitcoin Trust. Today, the Winklevosses unv...

Bill and Melinda Gates’ to-do list will probably put yours to shame. This year, in the Gates Foundation annual letter , the duo outlined their long-term, 15-year roadmap for the challenges that they want to solve. Their four main goals: Health: Reducing the number of children who die ...

PayPal’s developer arm Braintree has finished its initial integration work with Coinbase , and is opening up a beta program to its online merchants and mobile developers who want to start accepting bitcoin payments. No word yet on specific companies that have signed up for the beta, b...

Bitcoin is not having the best start to 2015. Bitstamp, the second-largest USD bitcoin exchange, suspended its operations early Monday morning after discovering one of its wallets has been “compromised”. (Update: Bitstamp has confirmed that 19,000 BTC, or $5 million, is missing — see ...

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You can buy an increasing number of goods of services with cryptocurrency Bitcoi n and Apple’s new mobile payments platform Pay , but soon their reach could expand to fines as well – specifically parking tickets. New York City is contemplating a mobile service that will let parking sc...

You can’t buy a Windows Phone with bitcoin, but now you can buy Minecraft for that phone with bitcoin. Microsoft announced today that it will now accept bitcoin (via BitPay) as a payment method for digital purchases, like Xbox games or Windows Phone apps. It’s limited right now to ite...

Of the 50,000 bitcoins up for auction, the Bitcoin Investment Trust bidding syndicate walked away with 48,000 of them. The US Marshals’ Service confirmed that the syndicate, which includes the Bitcoin Trust and the trading division of Barry Silbert’s SecondMarket, won the majority but...

When Apple released Apple Pay to the masses, it became a “moment.” Social media was flooded with photos and tweets of people tapping their phones to pay for their prescriptions at Walgreens or buying a Big Mac at McDonalds. News stations dispatched reporters to watch customers tap, ta...

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Remember when bitcoin was going to disrupt the world’s banking system? That was two years ago and, while new payment platforms like Venmo and Apple Pay have gained traction, virtual currencies now feel more like a fad than a phenomenon. At least that’s the view of Felix Salmon, a fina...

When it comes to offering Wi-Fi in the sky, airlines enjoy a situational monopoly. Still, this takes the cake: a Singapore Airlines passenger stepped off a plane, looked at his phone and discovered this bill for $1,171.46: As the passenger, Jeremy Gutsche, explains on TrendHunter , th...

It’s not burdensome to buy an item with bitcoin. A retailer rings up an order and presents the buyer with a QR code. The purchaser scans the code with his or her phone, taps a few buttons to confirm the purchase — and voila — a bitcoin purchase. However, mobile payments are experienci...

In response, though, FinCEN’s latest guidelines suggest that bitcoin exchanges and payment processors fall under money transmitter regulations — even if they are operating like a more traditional securities exchange with no money transferring between the company and a counterparty. It...

Every financial innovation, every time you mess with someone’s pocket book, there is skepticism. I recall when the first ATM came into my town and my mom saying “I don’t trust that machine. I want to go look someone in the eye at the bank.” Over time, convenience and usefulness one ou...

The price drop on Sunday was allegedly caused by an early adopter who sold 24,580 BTC on the BitStamp exchange, raking in about $7,374,000, according to a report from Pantera Capital. The order book was to sell 30,000 coins at $300 (below where the price was in the mid-300s that day),...

, bitcoin plunged to its lowest price in 2014 on Sunday, hitting $290.83 at one point. At its peak in 2014, a bitcoin was worth $951, according to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI). The price rebounded quickly on Monday, however, and now stands at $342.07 as of 9:45a.m. PT.

Crypto-sibling Ripple, which has its own payments protocol, also recently signed on two U.S. banks and a European one to link the continent’s financial networks together. With Apple Pay on the horizon, it makes sense to develop bitcoin as a global product rather than focus on the US w...

Circle is one of the big dogs of bitcoin, with almost $30 million in funding and a well-connected CEO, but until now the company has waited to show everyone what it’s doing. On Monday, though, it finally invited the general public to try out its digital currency platform. So what is C...

The case against Bitcoin Savings and Trust and its founder Trendon Shavers came to a close Friday after a judge found Shavers guilty of “knowingly and intentionally” operating a cryptocurrency ponzi scheme. Shavers’ case first drew headlines after the complaint was filed last July whe...

While it’s likely a factor, it’s hard to blame Alibaba’s IPO for the grand drop in price this week. The Apple Pay news may be rearing its ugly head on the price, and there’s still the pressure on the market of more sellers than buyers. With no trigger event, like another MtGox scandal...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange doesn’t normally give a lot of interviews from his sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London — but when he is promoting a new book, exceptions can be made. So the Australian freedom-of-information activist did one of Reddit’s trademark “Ask Me Anyt...

It’s not quite eBay or PayPal, but it’s close. Payment processor Braintree, which is an arm of PayPal and in the eBay family, announced its incorporation with bitcoin via Coinbase. That means companies that use Braintree to process their payments (standout names include Uber and Airbn...

Coinbase, the well-funded bitcoin exchange and wallet service, has opened shop in 13 European countries. It’s the first time Coinbase has officially expanded outside the U.S., allowing people to buy and sell bitcoins on the platform using a euro rather than dollar bank account – an im...

Block chain : As mentioned above, block chain is the distributed transaction processing engine that keeps track of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. The beauty of block chain is that it can be used for many purposes. Basically it’s a technology that allows data to be stored in a va...

Bitcoin has attracted the attention of a lot of large businesses from Expedia to Dell to Overstock. However when all of those companies started accepting bitcoin, it was only in the U.S. But the tide is starting to change as more businesses expand their bitcoin acceptance overseas. Ov...

Fast forward to late 2008 and the announcement of Bitcoin. I’ve noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50’s) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it. When Satoshi announced the first release of the softw...

The comment period for the BitLicense regulation has been extended another 45 days — a move that many in the bitcoin community have been campaigning for . CoinDesk has an in-depth interview about the proposed regulations with Ben Lawsky, the author of the regulations, who reveals that...

The comment period for the BitLicense regulation has been extended another 45 days — a move that many in the bitcoin community have been campaigning for . CoinDesk has an in-depth interview about the proposed regulations with Ben Lawsky, the author of the regulations, who reveals that...

If these sound like wildly ambitious companies to be going through a startup accelerator best known for incubating a cloud file sharing company and an apartment sharing platform, that’s because they are. You can’t help but be a little suspicious when faced with a whirlwind three-minut...